Today's Catch

The Titanic's sinking around 100 years ago created a new underwater habitat for organisms: the wreck itself. One of these is a species of bacteria -- named Halomonas titanicae after the great ship -- that lives inside icicle-like growths of rust, called "rusticles." These bacteria eat iron in the ship's hull and they will eventually consume the entire ship, recycling the nutrients into the ocean...Read more

A deep-sea octopus wraps itself around a submersible’s robotic arm 2,300 meters (7,546 feet) down in the Gulf of Mexico. "Most octopuses will let you get close, maybe even touch them, but normally they'll try to run once the manipulator gets close," said Bruce Strickrott, pilot of the submersible Alvin . Explore more octopus content and learn more in our Deep Ocean Exploration section .Read more

'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP . This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin. Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-...Read more

Sirenians , or seacows, are a group of marine mammals that include manatees and dugongs . Currently, only a single species of seacow is found anywhere in the world. However, the fossil record of seacows, which dates back 50 million years, tells a different story. Researchers from Howard University and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History documented three instances in the geologic...Read more

Geologist Charles Paull (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) investigates geologic features similar to pingos (Earth covered ice mounds found in the Arctic) on the Arctic Ocean floor where methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—bubbles through sediments and forms hundreds of low hills. Read an MBARI feature story “Of Pingos and Pockmarks” and find out more about Charles Paull’s research .Read more

Ari Daniel Shapiro is joined for this episode of One Species at a Time by serious beachcombers along the high-tide line of Sanibel Island, Florida. These “shellers” come in search of beautiful sea shells, sometimes no bigger than a grain of rice, that are the remains of marine snails, bivalves, and other mollusks. Along the beach and at the island's Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum , we learn why...Read more

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's "Line W" program is conducting research to better understand how the oceans and the atmosphere work together to cause, and are affected by, climate variability on the earth. Since 2001, a set of moored instruments and repeated research cruises across the Gulf Stream have helped form an unprecedented view of ocean circulation in a crucial part of the...Read more

“Sea grapes” may sound like something Poseidon would snack on, and not a killer algae. Yet Caulerpa racemosa var. cylindracea poses a serious threat to marine life. Spread by the bilge water of boats , this fast-growing alga is quick to take root, squeezing out native species. But there is one spot in the Mediterranean where cylindracea hasn’t yet taken over, and biologists like Juan Manuel Ruiz...Read more

"This World of Ours, Does not feel steady, We keep rotating, Oi! What will happen to us?" This is one of the questions that a group of performers from the Pacific island of Tuvalu is posed to audiences across the United States in 2011. With the Water is Rising project, they hoped to draw attention to threats associated with climate change , including sea-level rise, through dance , song, and...Read more

When the cod fishery collapsed in Newfoundland in the early 1990s, the hopes of the local fish harvesters collapsed with it. Hundreds of Newfoundlanders moved away and businesses that depended on the cod fishery closed. But retired schoolteacher Kit Ward of Portugal Cove South wasn’t content to watch her community vanish. She and some friends found a solution that was right under their feet, in...Read more